Ad Invasion, stage 2047.3, part 4

In My Humble Opinion
1

So since the advent of home video, marketers have been looking at those poor, poor families watching their own material on their own schedule without nobody and no one feeding them a nourishing diet of informative and amusing ads. And weeping in their beer at the loss of opportunity and revenue.

So first we got movie trailers loaded onto every DVD we bought. Meaning we watched those ads every time we loaded the disc, even years after the featured films (or worse, TV shows) were in the discount bins. Sometimes you could skip them all. Sometimes you could skip through each one - every time. And sometimes you threw the disc in and went to make snacks, because the 5-8 minutes of blather could not be skipped or fast-forwarded (Shrek 2, I’m lookin’ at YOU!)

Then came the wonders of HD discs, and people sniffed at HD-DVD’s integrated ability to pull in network content and decided Bluuuu-Rayyyyy sounded cooler and had much bigger discs - five times larger than needed to hold a movie, instead of just three or four times larger. The content capacity of which goes largely unused, and to which Sony promptly added “BD-Live,” a fabulous feature that could pull in yet more material too voluminous and fantastic to be put on an overstuffed disc.

Which, of course, quickly evolved into a way to insert contemporary trailers etc. into old discs, which is almost a benefit… but then it became straight-up Pepsi, Chevy and Swiffer ads. On your box. While watching your disc. Using your network connectivity. And often unskippable. Ha Ha, they said, we’ve gotten past the barrier and can now inform and amuse even families that want to watch a movie they already bought.

And so it evolves. The new generation of Samsung TVs has ad-insertion capabilites built in. It was supposed to be “opt-in” (yeah, right… let’s sign up for extra advertising on our new 60", guys) but gosh darnit, interrupting ads are popping up in the middle of everything watched on these sets - including home media streaming and movies that were not and neve were commercial on any level. How thoughtful to have your shakycam recording of the kids’ Xmas concert paused for a Pepsi ad!

The older BD-LIve and other inserts could be disabled, one way or the other, although the box would complain and pop up scary warnings if you did - or if you just yanked the network cable for the duration. It was almost a bigger PITA to try and disable the insert material and control than just sit through it. (Imagine!) Now, however, gear is coming close to halting operation if it doesn’t have an active network connection… for updates and Completely Legitimate Extensions of your new Blu-Ray disc and so forth.

There’s not a lot of corners left to hide in, folks.

2

The one that’s really bugging me lately is the YouTube ads- not the one at the beginning, I can live with that, but the ones that are suddenly cropping up midway through a video. What the hell? A 15 minute video of vegetable growing tips now has three ad breaks?!

Sure, you can skip them after a few seconds, but they can crop up mid sentence…

3

A few salutary hangings of ad-men and executives should slow the problem down a bit.

[Cue Cyril Kornbluth] [Cue Fred Pohl]

4

Nah. There’s more marketing weens than lawyers these days, and that’s with more lawyers than rats.

But yes, it’s past time to push back.

Far-sighted visionaries, along with Mad magazine, that led to Max Headroom and then back around to Mad Men. Oh, well. So much for pushing back.

5

There are advantages to not being an early adopter, and that means I have not encountered the obnoxious behaviour see by my (apparent) understudy.

That said I understand the desire to put ads in everything–like the saying goes, if you can’t figure out who’s paying for dinner, you’re the one being sold–but there are limits, and seeing ads in material that I’ve created is just not done.

Our society is in the middle of an incredible shift in advertising dollars away from mainstream media, and whither eyeballs go, so do advertisers.

But ultimately if you cannot opt out of the ads for something you have already paid for, all you can do is opt out of consuming that type of media, which the data I get to look at shows increasing numbers of people are doing.

6

The thing I hate is those pop-up ads for another show which ruins the current show I am watching. There are several shows that I boycott due to that getting out of hand. It’s obnoxious.

7

Dish charges extra if you don’t keep the box hooked to a phone line. Grrrrrr :mad:

I may go back to books made from trees. :smiley:

8

“Bottom fungus.” It’s another thing I rarely see in the wild, having cut the cable long ago, but each time I see another example on a waiting-room TV or in a restaurant, I am again astounded at how much more prominent, prevalent and obnoxious it’s gotten. I swear that some of the shows seem to be actually edited around that content - that is, not presenting anything essential for the ten or so seconds it is expected to be on the screen. Kind of like writing in “pause ten seconds for applause” in the script.

I particularly love the ones the pop up, wiggle, jiggle, sashay and sometimes even have sound effects to let you know which show you’re watching.

9

Once upon a time, newspapers were really cheap, because the advertising dollars allowed the publishers to keep the price down. So, I didn’t mind the advertising.

But, with digital media, I tend to be of the opinion that a DVD is likely to cost $15 dollars whether there is advertising on it or not. In other words, I am not seeing the benefit to me. If it doesn’t benefit me, at least nominally, it’s just annoying. It’s just adding insult to injury when the ads are not skip-able.

I tend to purchase the movies that I am interested in keeping forever, then using sneaky software to rip the main content, then playing that content using an O-player or similar. No ads.

If they started to sell 2 different disks - with ads and without - I would absolutely pony up the extra $$ to avoid the hassle.

10

Here’s a fun experiment: hunt down a (functioning) VCR. Hook it up to a CRT TV. Now, from a fully plugged-in but unpowered state, start a stopwatch, turn the TV and VCR on, pop in a tape and start playing it. As soon as the tape starts- that is, as soon as you’re actually getting sound and visuals, hit the stopwatch again. Record the time. Repeat several times. If possible, repeat with multiple televisions and VCRs. Now, try it with a flatscreen and DVD or Blue-Ray (Sony can’t spell; that doesn’t mean I can’t) player. Unless you have unusually fast new equipment or unusually slow old stuff, you’ll notice that you can usually have a tape in and playing (often having fast-forwarded past the previews (modern internet society apparently can’t have a linear relationship to time; that doesn’t mean I can’t) and FBI Warnings) before the flatscreen has even finished turning on. Not only do people accept this, they do so without so much as complaining, apparently having forgotten how much faster things used to be.

So if you were an advertiser, realizing this, why on earth wouldn’t you figure “people obviously don’t mind delays”, and cram in every last ad you can?

11

Okay, wow, I’ve seen some nonsequiturs here, but most of their posters have long since been banned. :slight_smile:

For one thing, old TVs and VCRs tended to “run hot” - consuming dozens or hundreds of watts just sitting there in case you wanted to flick them on. (Cable boxes still do. If you have a DVR cable box and LED light bulbs, your box probably consumes 5X as much juice in a month as your lights. Think about it.) If you disabled the “instant on” feature, as you often could via a back-panel switch, the TV could take a minute or more to reach sound+visual. Ditto for VCRs.

Along came this thing called EnergyStar, and to qualify, appliances now have to draw between 0 and 2W in “standby” or “off” mode. That means TVs are going to need a warmup period, especially for the high-voltage circuits in a plasma and the lighting panels in LCD/LED models.

So yes, old gear might let you go from blank to blank-minded faster, but there are many reasons for the time tradeoff. My whole system, powered up from a macro remote, takes about 20 seconds to show me Roku’s selection menu. I can wait.

I suppose there’s some faint connection between that and cramming in several minutes of ads, but I really don’t see it. You have the gist of it right, though: they found out that we’d put up with it.

Imagine this: it’s about 1990. You walk into a theater to see (riffles IMDb) Ghost or Home Alone. Do you get fifteen minutes of dim lighting with forgettable music? No, you get a blaring, obnoxious, self-promoting stream of obnoxious ads masquerading as an “entertainment” show. You can’t tune it out. You can’t turn it off. You can’t even leave and hang in the lobby until the film starts. You’re just effin’ trapped with this crap, having paid for the privilege to boot.

Do you (1) find the manager and demand your money back; (2) go “Wow, cool!” or (3) realize that in 20 years people will actually be getting to the theater a little early to catch this shit?